Evaluate your advertising efforts

Sept. 8, 2015
When it comes to the things shop owners want to spend money on, marketing and advertising aren’t typically at the top of the list. But without marketing or advertising, you’ll never generate the revenue needed to fund new tool purchases or staff expansions.

When it comes to the things shop owners want to spend money on, marketing and advertising aren’t typically at the top of the list. Most of us can think of a million other items we’d rather invest in – from new equipment to additional technicians. But the reality is, without marketing or advertising, you’ll never generate the revenue needed to fund new tool purchases or staff expansions.   

Still, I can understand why there’s a reluctance to allocate budget for marketing and advertising expenditures. More often than not, shop owners tell me that their marketing and advertising programs often fall short of expectations, and they fail to see a solid return on their investment. While it’s true that some advertising vehicles are bound to underperform because they’re too broad-based (i.e. radio advertisements), if a more strategically-targeted approach still isn’t delivering results, then the problem might lie in your evaluation methods.

Think Strategically

In my experience, tracking the wrong metric can cause you to abandon a marketing vehicle too soon. These days, the industry trend is to measure your performance based on ticket averages. Under this approach, an uptick in ticket average following an ad campaign would be considered a success. But let’s say the month after your campaign hits, your ticket averages decline, but your car counts rise. If you follow industry norms, you’d probably consider the campaign a failure.

But I believe that way of thinking is too simplistic. An effective advertising effort can deliver a number of benefits. For some shops, a successful marketing campaign might increase car count, for others, it might stem a downward sales trend or generate repeat visits. The point is that judging success or failure simply on ticket average is fairly restrictive and encourages shop owners to try to obtain more sales from fewer cars – an increasingly difficult task given how well-built modern cars are.

Instead, I advocate tracking a number of factors and tying those factors to the goals you want to achieve. Before you start any kind of marketing effort take a look at your sales, not just month to month but the same month year after year, so you can get a clearer sense of the situation and whether you have problems that aren’t due simply to seasonal trends. Once you have the numbers, you’ll be in a better position to determine what you want your advertising campaigns to accomplish.

I am not going to talk a lot about what type of marketing works best, but I think whatever you decide to use should be tracked. If you can’t track it, that should be a sign that it might not be worth your money. Everything I do has a unique tracking number. So, if I post a coupon on my website, the number to call for that offer is going to be different than the number on my direct mail postcards or the number that comes up on my pay-per-click ads.

The Art of Call Tracking

Tracking the number of calls that are generated from each advertising source is key, but perhaps even more important is listening to the way those calls were handled. Again, if you’re working with a vendor that doesn’t record those calls, consider it a red flag. You want to track as thoroughly as you can.

When you listen to the calls, evaluate the responsiveness of your staff. Are they asking callers when they can bring their cars in or are they telling the caller that they can’t fit them into the shop’s schedule? Are they turning away $25 oil changes because their bonuses are tied to pulling in higher cost repairs? Failing to say yes to potential customers can cost your shop valuable leads and may cause you to end a campaign that could’ve been successful with a better trained staff.

Think Long-Term

Another common mistake – especially when it comes to tracking direct mail – is to count the number of coupons that are redeemed and base the effectiveness of the campaign solely on that number. Limiting your evaluation to coupon redemption is a bad approach because it doesn’t include the non-coupon shopper. I tend to target high-income areas with my marketing campaigns and those consumers don’t typically use coupons, yet they are coming to my shops because they’ve seen my mailers.

By focusing on coupon redemptions, shop owners also discount the impact that new customers will have over the lifetime of their relationship with you. If your campaign generates 100 new customer visits, and 75 of those customers stay with you, those relationships could have a tremendous impact – generating thousands of dollars for your shop over the long term.  But if you only look at what a campaign generates initially, it’s a wash. Focus on customer counts and total revenue and you’ll have a better idea of the effectiveness of your efforts.

Innovations abound

Of course, there are now tools that can help you dig even deeper. Mudlick Mail, the company I developed to make direct mail more user-friendly and the one I use for all my mailings, offers a penetration report that will help you determine if you’re targeting the right customers. The report examines your response rate and analyzes which leads came from which carrier routes. That way, you can see which routes are underperforming. You want to put your money in the routes that are going to give you the best return.

You also want to ensure that your campaigns are attracting the right kind of customer for your shop. If you operate a shop that’s been open for a few years, your focus might be on building loyalty. I can’t speak about the capabilities of other companies, but Mudlick provides a database matching program that can examine your database to see if the sales produced by a direct mail campaign are coming from existing customers or customers new to your shop.

At the end of the day, the key is to be more strategic in your approach to tracking and measuring your return on investment based on only one metric—whether it’s sales or your average repair order isn’t going to give you the full picture. Instead, look at the goals you want your campaign to achieve and track your results based on how well your marketing efforts met your objectives.   

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